Like haunted houses? Scientists do.

That's because they're an excellent place to study how humans respond to — and actively seek out — fear.

"Typically when we study things in the lab, we're exposing people to these repeated, low-intensity experiences. And that's not really the way we experience threat in the real world," says neuroscientist Sarah Tashjian, head of the Affective Neuroscience and Development Lab at the University of Melbourne. "Haunted houses have a benefit in that they're these really immersive experiences that have all of these sensations going on at the same time … so they're closer to what we might experience in the real world."